Skibidi Ohio and Doo Wop

 I once heard a story of Oprah that said she quit following the Christian faith when she read scripture that said God is a jealous God. She said that she couldn’t follow anyone who said they were jealous. I have no idea if this story is true but I get it. No one would want to follow a God that was jealous in the sense of the word that we currently understand. But if this story is true, what she didn’t consider was the meaning behind the interpreted word, jealous.

Much like the title of this blog, jealous is an easily misunderstood stump-the-band kind of word. And to make it more difficult, this same English word bears different meanings in different parts of the Bible. Its use in describing God in Exodus and Zechariah is very different from its use in 1 Corinthians that tells us love is not jealous.

Our present day understanding of jealousness bears the following synonyms.

envious, covetous, resentful, begrudging, bitter, malicious, spiteful, greedy, selfish

This is not my understanding of God! After a bit of searching, I found the biblical meaning in a footnote in the Amplified version of the Bible.

“There is no implication of envy in the ‘jealousy’ of God, but rather the boundless enthusiasm of the Lord which loves holiness, hates sin, brings judgment upon sinners, and intervenes on behalf of His godly ones.” ~Charles Feinberg, God Remembers.

Am I adept in ancient Hebrew? Do I have a degree in theology? No and no. I simply listened to the Voice that told me my current-day understanding was wrong and investigated using tools that anyone can access today. I stopped reading and searched these tools. I didn’t leave this passage until I found the answer from a trusted source that was in line with the God that I know. 

As I understand it, interpreting ancient texts is nothing like translating from one language to another present day language. When my understanding of new Gen Z terms like “skibidi Ohio” is sketchy, how can text from over 3000 years ago be easy to decipher? Imagine how someone 2000 years from now would understand the title of this article.

I must rely on people who study this ancient language for a living. One theologian (I can’t remember who), said that the Bible was a collection of works by inspired authors about their view of God from their place in history, each like a facet of a gemstone. So to understand scripture I must immerse myself in the culture of the author and read it from that perspective. 

Reading the Bible is not like reading a novel, although some parts like Esther are more readable than others. It is rather, a seeking-type reading. I must be careful not to pluck scripture out of context of the culture in which it was written and apply it to support my opinion. I am sure I have done this in my lifetime and I believe that those who do this publicly on social media will be held accountable for this someday, even if it is a click-of-the-button repost. 

I have an understanding of the character of God that came about over 65 years of sermons, prayers, Bible lessons and experiences. But I still need to slow down when I read the Bible. I still need to seek out meaning and not take everything at face value. I still need to listen to scholars who study the ancient text. But most of all, I need to listen to the Voice that tells me when I am getting it wrong and approach the Bible with an open heart and prayer.

You Are Never Too Old for Stories

 I love stories! If you ever went to Sunday School as a small child, you heard Bible stories. They were often accompanied by ancient pictures hung so high around the classroom that you must tilt your head way back to see them. I guess that was to keep our grimy fingers off of them. The lucky ones of us attended a church where they had a flannel-graph of the characters and the child who was most trusted got to stick the character on the flannel board when the teacher gave them the ok.

Then at some point we aged out of Bible stories and flannel-graphs. I don’t know who decided this. Maybe they just ran out of G-rated stories for littles since most Bible stories are definitely of the rougher variety. When I was a teen going to church, I loved it when I got to listen to an animated version of a Bible story told by an inspired youth director. They were so enthusiastic that they often included choreography which was frowned upon in my church. As an adult, I must admit that I still love an artfully told Bible story in the sermon. It takes me back to the time and place in which it was written and gives me a new understanding of a story I have heard a hundred times before.

As you can tell, I was privileged to hear the Bible through many different folks. In my daddy’s final years of life he told me that it was Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible by Dr. Jesse Lyman Hurlbut that led him to know Christ. Dad later became a minister. He told me that his mom used the scant money she had to buy this book from a door-to-door salesman. This would have been in the 1930’s(almost 100 years ago!). Dad said he devoured that book. It contained 168 stories of a continuous narrative from Genesis to Revelation.

Sometimes I feel that we ruined the Bible when we divided it into chapters and verses that can be quickly plucked out of time and cultural setting and posted on social media. The essence is lost and it becomes a weapon to reinforce our point of view. I believe the Bible was meant to be read as stories and not as a rule book or as history lessons and definitely not in individual verses plucked out of context, although I have been guilty of all of this.

Knowing the setting of a story is vital, yet somehow these stories transcend time and place and touch our hearts today. They take us into worlds we can never know and teach us lessons from other cultures and timeframes. Just as every book or movie must first introduce us to the cultural mores before it tells us the story, so must those Bible stories. And I can’t help but think that this is the correct way to read the Bible. We must step back into the strange traditions and rituals of the time when the story took place to truly understand it. For example, look at the ever-popular story of Daniel in the lion’s den. If we did not understand Daniel’s backstory and his heritage and the traumatizing events that took him to this strange land, we would not be getting the full story. And if we didn’t get the full story we would be missing out on much of the application to our own lives.

Reading the Bible without any knowledge of the culture is not really reading for understanding. It is an eyeball exercise in piety. The Bible is uniquely recorded by people from different centuries, cultures, socio-economic status and careers; including everything from kings to fishermen and felons to prophets. And the various characters include slaves, beautiful queens, hookers, virgins and eunuchs. The attitudes encompass everything from gratitude to bitterness and anger. The stories are so riveting that they are the stuff of movies like The Ten Commandments and the beautifully inspired stories in the series called The Chosen. Maybe it is time for us to take a trip through time and re-visit those ancient stories. And we need to do this in a most delightful way. Enjoy the journey.

Hugging Rattlesnakes

 I have lived with the most innately discerning human for 37 years today. Being lacking in this area, I am ever-amazed at his abilities. He seems to see through to the motives of people and only on a rare occasion is he proven wrong. Discernment is like being able, at a glance, to recognize a beneficial snake from a venomous one, on the fly, while you are a little freaked out. I feel discernment is a very crucial skill in our world and especially for Christians.

How can we as Christians love everyone yet still have the discernment to know when someone is manipulating us? Because I am old, I have seen many instances where Christians were suckered in and manipulated by someone who does harm to them or to their church. I also have seen precious people who adamantly believe they should love and accept everyone be totally lost when they are forced to take a stand. They have no ability to discern. On the other end of the spectrum, I have seen Christians who build tall walls around them and their family because they aren’t able to discern the beneficial from the poisonous. These opposite approaches to living the Christian life have the same issue. We need discernment.

How do you determine a beneficial snake from a poisonous viper? It is through education and experience. Without education we either kill all the snakes, good and bad or we accept all the snakes and end up in the emergency room or worse. The analogy holds up for discernment. But the hard way to learn discernment is experience. Trust me, life is short and we really don’t want to learn everything the hard way. Thankfully, discernment also comes through education and the Bible is the ultimate source of stories of good and bad discernment and how to live as a Christ follower in an evil world. The problem for most of us is the Bible is tough to understand so we opt for an easier path.

Here is one example of the stuff that makes reading the Bible more of an adventure than a pastime, and definitely not for the faint of heart. In the beginning of Genesis, God designed one man for one woman. Then a few chapters later we see Ol’ Abraham taking more than his fair share of women. Yet he was flippin’ Abraham, the Big Kahuna of faith! So confusing! Mysteriously, if we prayerfully seek God we will begin to sort through the culture and sin and understand the important lessons about God in this book of stories of flawed humans realizing it doesn’t read like a novel. And it shouldn’t be read like a simplistic rule book either.

Eat This Book, by Eugene Peterson is a book about how to read the Bible and is very helpful in understanding it. This book is challenging reading for me but I must say that I have begun to grasp some points that Dr. Peterson made. One of the main concepts in his book is that the Bible is largely written in stories(narratives) and should be read as such. We shouldn’t pluck a verse out of a story and call it quits. The very essence of God is expressed in each of these narratives. For example, Esther is a book of the Bible that never mentions God but the character and values of God are woven through this story. It is a wonderful story and I highly recommend reading it. However, if we approach this reading of Esther literally, we will be out skewering our enemies on tall poles. Each narrative in the Bible is set in a different time, culture and location. We must take this into consideration before we attempt to interpret any story of the Bible. So if we educate ourselves to the setting and culture in which the story is written, we will certainly begin to understand more about God and how to recognize a viper.

As Christians, we have to decide how to treat sin and our fellow sinners. I believe the best advice is in the actions of Jesus. He did not treat them all the same. He did not hug all the snakes. On one hand, Jesus said, “He who is without sin should cast the first stone” choosing not to condemn. But on the other hand, Jesus set his foot down adamantly against many proud pious folks, calling them snakes and broods of vipers. How did he know what to condemn? He was so brilliant. But He was God. He could look into the heart. And I am not and cannot. Thankfully he left us with the Holy Spirit and a Bible full of stories and advice. This is our resource so we must seek it out wisely.

Christians must be smart and discerning. We cannot accept everyone at face value. We must look through the facade. We must see past the fashionable clothing and alluring words and consider the motives of the heart. But we must also realize we are still sinners and not above anyone else. We have simply accepted a beautiful gift that others have rejected. It is like walking on a tight rope, there is always tension because it is not easy. If there is no tension when it comes to discernment, chances are we are choosing not to discern but choosing to accept all or reject all. We must discern the non-venomous snakes from the venomous and the best way to do that is through prayerfully, relentlessly studying the Bible.

Memorize It, They Said

 Do you remember that scene from Charlie Brown Christmas where Linus stands up and quotes scripture from Luke 2? It is a sweet memory that is probably engraved in your mind as it is in mine. As a Baptist preacher’s kid I have been required to memorize scripture more times than I can recall. One of my first attempts was for a Christmas play. I was required to memorize half of a verse and say it at the right time. The half verse was this: “for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.” Of course this was King James Version because, back then we didn’t have choices. I balked, declaring that it was poor English and made no sense. I begged my parents to let me change it to make sense. That did not fly. So I said it. And I am sure it was with zero enthusiasm and a lot of prompting and my attempts to memorize after that day never got easier.

I have been required to memorize multiple verses, poems, and even a short story. But here is the rub. I never could successfully quote a single sentence unless I was saying it with a group or it was set to music like the ABC song. I always had to improvise. I could never lead the Lord’s Prayer or even quote John 3:16 without a flub up. Ever. Even with hundreds of repetitions, never could I quote anything from movie lines to the Gettysburg address flawlessly. And it is not that I haven’t tried. More recently I have downloaded an app to help me memorize. I spent time once a day for a couple of years attempting to memorize verses. Even after all those attempts, it never stuck. I often questioned God on why my brain couldn’t memorize. He gave me no direct answer.

I often tell this story of my mom. My mother suffered with dementia in her later years so I would attend church services with her in her nursing home. One Sunday, a pastor in the middle of his sermon quoted John 10:10 leaving the end unfinished for his sleepy, geriatric audience to complete. He said, “I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more–.” He stopped and waited. I was thinking, “dude, know your audience,” when much to my surprise, mom lifted her head and boldly filled in “abundantly.” I sat there amazed with tears in my eyes.

Sometimes bits and pieces of those failed memorized passages will come to my mind out of the blue much like mom’s did. Being curious about where in the Bible the random phrase originated or if I made it up, I will type the words into the Google search bar and the scripture address pops right up. And it was always what I need to hear when I need to hear it. My recall and my mom’s recall(and the Google search engine) amaze me. I’m sure all of it can be explained away scientifically but this could never explain how the brain came to be engineered this way. I know Who created my brain. I know Who set the stars in the heavens. And I know Who brings those phrases to mind at just the right time.

The Good Book

 Psalm 119:105 NIV

[105] Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.

One thing that I have been struggling with lately is the pull of reading good Bible-based books in the place of reading the Bible itself. There are so many wonderful scripture inspired books being written right now. I get excited about them and want to spend some of my quiet time reading them instead of going straight to the scripture.  

However, in these faithful book studies, the authors point out that the true source is the Bible and the Holy Spirit speaking to me through it. All other words, from Billy Graham or C.S. Lewis or Henri Nouwen or Martin Luther King or John Wesley, pale in comparison to the words of the Bible itself applied to an open heart by our Holy Spirit. 

Does this mean we should toss the words of C.S. Lewis and the gang? Oh no! One caveat for those books about the scripture is that they can be used as a tool to lead us to the scripture itself. This is why we should continue to read them. But we should be careful that we don’t allot all our precious time to them, disregarding the reading of the Bible itself. We should prioritize and value the Bible above the others.  It is like baseball.  It is good to learn how to steal bases or what to do in a squeeze play.  But it is worthless if you don’t know how to throw, catch and hit the ball. The Bible teaches our heart the basics. 

Hebrews 4:12 NIV
[12] For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.

But what if I don’t understand the Bible? How can I read it?  Remember that the Holy Spirit is given to each of us when we give our hearts to God. He is an interpreter. Pray for his guidance and trust that He will show you what you need to find. Don’t compare yourself to others. Look to God. Trust the Holy Spirit and learn from the words of Jesus.  

When I get more excited about reading a book about the Bible than I do about the Bible itself, I have to review the amazing journey the words of the scripture have made throughout history. This reminds me of how God has protected his Word through wars, plagues, fire, flood and decay.  I have to remind myself that the very words I am reading have gone through a miraculous journey of time. I have to remind myself of the fairly recent amazing discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls which verified, magnified and reinforced the truth of the scripture handed down through the ages. I have to see that no other book has endured the test of time like our Holy scripture.  And I have to realize the privilege I have to read them myself. 

Part of Dead Sea Scroll 28a from Qumran Cave 1. The Jordan Museum, Amman.jpg
From Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository

2 Timothy 3:16-17 NIV
[16] All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, [17] so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.

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